Towards a feminist political economy of the poppy and forced displacement in Guerrero

Abstract

The state of Guerrero, located in southern Mexico, has become a paradigmatic territory to document the multiple violences produced by the State and capitalism. Extractivism, territorial dispossession, drug trafficking, militarization, decades of neoliberal policies, migration and forced displacement are just the most dramatic examples. Perhaps no element more clearly reveals the way in which all these forms of violence complement each other and converge in the same territory than poppy cultivation and the production of opium gum. Poppy has gone from being a relatively unknown crop, complementary to the income of peasant families in remote and impoverished areas; to become the best strategy to invest remittances arriving from the United States, generate wealth and prevent further emigration. However, during the last decade, it has become a crucial component of forced displacement in the region, while Guerrero became one of the states most affected by armed violence in Mexico.
Here we analyze the ways in which women have sustained poppy’s political economy through productive, reproductive, emotional and care work, and how new and historical violence that it has generated affects them disproportionately. We place at the center the ways in which domination and violence of the narco-state-capital concentrates in the bodies and in the (re)productive and emotional labor of women. But also in the ways in which they respond building forms of resistance and re-existence for "bien vivir", peace, defense of territory and life, before and during displacement.